From the Editor

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the third issue of The International Trade Journal (ITJ)’s thirty-sixth volume. The first two articles in this issue look at the political economy of trade and investment.¹ The first article looks at how party affiliation affects greenfield foreign investment into the United States, while the second looks at how relative comparative advantage affects tariff levels. The third article looks at how openness to trade and investment affects human development, while the final article looks at export competitiveness in the palm oil sector.

The first article in this issue, by Rusty V. Karst and Andrew Johnson, looks at how political affiliation affected greenfield foreign investment in the United States. The authors find that greenfield foreign investment between 2014 and 2016 was higher in counties where the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate received a greater share of the vote. They suggest this could be because these counties are more welcoming to foreign immigration and more supportive of multilateralism.

The second article, by Kyle Van Rensselaer, examines tariff levels in the United States, Mexico, and Canada and assesses whether they are affected by relative comparative advantage. The study argues that if countries set tariff levels to protect vulnerable industries against foreign competition, we would expect tariffs to be lower in sectors where domestic firms are more competitive. Using two measures of revealed comparative advantage to measure competitiveness, Van Rensselaer shows that tariffs are not always lower in sectors where the countries appear more competitive.² Moreover, revealed comparative advantage appears to affect tariffs in agriculture, raw materials, intermediate inputs, and consumer goods to different degrees.

The third article, by Helmi Hamdi and Abdelaziz Hakimi, explores whether openness to trade and investment affects human development in the Middle East and North Africa. The authors measure human development using the United Nation’s Human Development Index—a composite index of life expectancy, years of schooling, and per-capita gross national income. They find that both foreign direct investment and trade openness encourage human development in the long run. In contrast, only foreign direct investment affects human development in the short run.

The final article, by Evelyn S. Devadason and Muhammad Shujaat Mubarik, looks at intraregional exports of palm oil and palm oil-based products in Southeast Asia and Latin America. The authors note that although between 50 and 60% of palm oil exports from Latin America go to other countries in Latin America, only about 10 to 20% of exports from Southeast Asia are to other countries in Southeast Asia. Using a stochastic frontier gravity model, they compare export performance for intraregional trade for the two regions. Despite the differences between the two regions, they find that both regions underperform relative to their potential.

As usual, we would like to thank the people without whom the ITJ would not succeed. We would like to thank the authors who contribute their articles, the anonymous referees who give detailed and timely comments, the team members at the International Trade Institute at Texas A&M International University who process submissions quickly and efficiently, our editorial board members who guide the journal, and our publisher, Taylor & Francis, which ensures that the ITJ keeps its high standards.

Notes

¹ Several other recent articles in the ITJ have looked at the political economy of trade and investment. Boudreaux (2015) looks at the effect of democracy on trade, while Lee (2014) looks at how outward investment by U.S. multinationals and their suppliers affects U.S. trade protection.

² Two other recent articles in the ITJ have looked at revealed comparative advantage in different contexts (Seleka and Kebakile 2017; Arias, Pacheco, and Arias 2020).